


soft shock

by temerity (forsanethaec)



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drug Use, M/M, Reconciliation, break-ups
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-23
Updated: 2013-01-23
Packaged: 2017-11-26 13:16:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/650894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forsanethaec/pseuds/temerity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s bitterly cold and clear as a bell, a Tuesday, and it’s the first time he’s managed to get Harry over here in three weeks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	soft shock

**Author's Note:**

> mad props to shan for the quickie beta and the title, with apologies to our cardboard niall cutout for this not being about him. get u next time, b.

It’s Harry on the phone when Zayn rolls over and presses answer, palm skidding across the cluttered coffee table. He knows it before he’s even properly awake, before he knows he was even asleep in the first place.

“Zayn? Wake up, it's snowed and there's this weird blue light and it's wicked, man, I wanted you to see it, I wanted you to wake up and see it with me. Zayn. I wanted you to see it.” His voice tumbles out, a rough, loping rush. “Mate, are you there?

“Harry?”

“Yeah.”

“What time's it?” He’s looking at the clock on the cable box; it’s half two.

“Half two,” Harry says.

“In the morning?” Zayn knows it is, but he’s just saying anything.

“Zayn, listen—”

“What've you been taking?”

Nothing, then: “Bit of uppers. Couple lines with Lou.” Harry’s voice goes dull.

“It's alright,” Zayn says. “I don't care. You wanna come over?”

“Come look at the snow with me,” Harry breathes.

“Come look here,” Zayn says. “Has Louis gone?”

Another beat. “Yeah.”

“You can come here, Haz.” He gets up, blanket dragging off the couch and pooling around his stumbling feet before getting left behind on the cold carpet. Harry hasn’t said anything, and Zayn can hear the white noise on the other end now he’s waking up a bit, shouting and cars, like the outside of a club.

“Alright,” Harry says finally, a low, despondent little sound, like he’s the one giving into Zayn and not the other way around. He hangs up. Zayn’s at the kitchen window, open from when he was having a smoke earlier. His place is a mess, and he runs one hand through his hair, drags the other up his stomach beneath his t-shirt as he stretches.

He shoves up the screen, curls his fingers into the snow on the sill and leans out to look over the dingy courtyard. It’s bitterly cold and clear as a bell, a Tuesday, and it’s the first time he’s managed to get Harry over here in three weeks.

There’s no room on the kitchen table, stacks of test prep books, stapled grad school apps he won’t finish spread out like a tableau of some old cartographer’s study. He eats on the couch now mostly, takeaway. Sleeps there sometimes too. The fluorescent light on the ceiling is a harsh, singular circle, and he sits down in a chair, scrubbing at his eyes, and starts to roll a spliff.

 

(They’d had a good run of it together, during uni, after. Fun like they’d dreamed about, like in the movies – the lines of them all blurry, not caring enough about money and caring more than was practical about each other. Then Zayn decided to try and go back to school, and Harry met Louis, and neither of them really got what they wanted.)

 

“He always wants to go out, but I think once he gets that it’s not – once we’re not—” Harry hiccups a little on his inhale, looking down at the slush melting on his shoes. “Then he leaves.” Blue smoke pushing out between his lips.

“Don’t take it personal, like,” Zayn says, accepting the spliff back. “Just hard.”

“I know,” Harry says, as sad and soulful as anything, and it feels like clotting in Zayn’s chest how much he wants to make sure nothing else bad ever has to happen to this boy. He takes his hit.

They’re sitting in kitchen chairs with their feet drawn up. The blue light off the snow Harry had talked about is pooling on the floor, weirdly bright, it’s true, thin and dilute and shivery-still. Too many lights in the city for real snow right after it’s fallen, and the lights in their apartment – Zayn’s apartment – are all off. The cherry of their shared joint flames up orange.

“It’s what we both wanted, you know,” Harry says in answer to nothing. He takes a hit. “Lou’s getting too old for shit like this. And I’m.” He swallows visibly, tight throat evident in how his jaw clenches. “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Zayn presses an absent palm to his chest and feels his heartbeat, rabbit-quick.

“Shh,” Zayn says, so quiet he can barely hear himself. He pulls his hand back slow once Harry takes a breath, in for three, out for six, like they used to do together on their backs in bed to come down together.

“Stupid,” Harry mutters. His mouth ducks down like a child’s and he hands the joint back to Zayn with pinched fingers. “I’m sorry.”

“Nah,” Zayn says. “Just wasn’t right for the two of you, now. Anymore.”

Harry gnaws on his lower lip, hunted bright eyes watching Zayn suck his hit in deep and blow it out slow. Zayn won’t tell Harry he made a mistake, because he didn’t, or it doesn’t matter, anyway. He knows Harry loved Louis, that they loved each other, in their own time. Like he and Harry loved each other in theirs. It’s what he hopes. It’s the best he can do, this heavy shrug of a way of looking back.

He hands Harry the spliff and comments, absently, “People leave.” His eyes are out the window, on the white-blue wash of the cinderblocks across the courtyard, scarce puffs of snow blowing down. There’s gooseflesh up his arms from the outside air drifting in. “Gotta do what they’ve got to.” He doesn’t believe it, but it’s all he thinks they’ve really learned.

“You think this is really it, then?” he hedges after a while. “For you and him.”

Harry doesn’t say anything. He’s mellowed a little since he first rang, maybe talk of Louis or a solitary cab ride or the weed dragging him down. His shoulders keep ticking in, his broad back, chest too thin, all caving, and he might just want to lean full in onto Zayn and mush them together, or Zayn could be projecting. But they don’t do that anymore.

“Harry?” he asks anyway. He slides his hand over Harry’s shoulder, squeezes the knotted muscle. Harry keens into it, just enough. “Yeah?” Zayn murmurs, searching for Harry’s eyes. Harry nods, eyelids drooping. Zayn slips his hand around the back of Harry’s neck and scratches up into his hair at his nape, and Harry closes his eyes all the way.

“Never mind,” Zayn murmurs.

“Thanks for letting me come over.” Harry’s voice is more rough breath than sound. He drops his knees down akimbo in his chair, and leans forward to push his face into Zayn’s chest.

Zayn sighs. He crushes the spliff out in a heavy-bottomed ashtray Harry knicked for them from a pub going on two years ago, sets the ashtray atop an abandoned GRE book.

“Let me shut the window, babe,” he says into the top of Harry’s head after a little while. Soft hair, smelling familiar and complicated. He disentangles himself with waterlogged limbs and stands up.

When he turns back from shutting the sash, it’s to see Harry and nothing but Harry, Harry stepping between his feet and Harry’s fingers curling into his hips at the hem of his t-shirt and Harry, Harry fitting their mouths together.

Zayn backs into the wall and they stumble together, stoned, cold, four in the morning. His hands go around Harry’s waist and he pulls him in, body feeling like it might go shaky with relief.

“Sure you’re shot of him,” he mumbles into the corner of Harry’s mouth.

“Yes.” Harry chases Zayn’s lips, fingers skittering up his back, heavy and warm against him. “Zayn, leave it.”

“No, ‘cause I—” Zayn swallows. “You know I’ve missed – us,” he manages eventually, barely above a whisper. “I just wanna be sure, for you. Does that make sense?”

Harry’s gone still. “Yeah,” he says, and suddenly his face is in the side of Zayn’s neck, he’s wrapped up in him, and he’s bigger than Zayn but he feels very small. “It’s done.” His voice is thick and muffled, and his hands are fists in the hem of Zayn’s shirt, tugging him bodily downward until they’re tangled up, half on their knees, on the kitchen floor. “I promise.”

Zayn curls them together, kisses the side of Harry’s neck, kisses his mouth and his temple. He thinks how they’ve moved without moving, in place, back to each other. Blue light on books on the kitchen table he’s never going to read, and on the side of Harry’s face, and Harry’s fingers curled in his.


End file.
